Esa News

The final commands for the landing of the ExoMars spacecraft have been uploaded in preparation for the joint European Space Agency/Roscosmos “ExoMars” mission's landing on the Martian surface on Sunday.

Alexander Gerst, a German astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS) offered humanity a special gift on Christmas, with 12500 photos of the planet sequenced into a stunning six-minute timelapse video.

The effects of climate change are now so profound that gravity itself is changing. The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Friday that Antarctica has lost enough ice in only three years to cause a shift in the Earth's gravitational pull.

St. Petersburg -
More than a dozen species of corals are the newest addition to the Endangered Species Act, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Announced on Tuesday. The listing of 20 species is the largest Endangered Species Act ruling ever.

The European Space Agency's Rosetta Comet mission has chosen five likely landing sites for its Philae's lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The lander is scheduled to descend down to the comet's nucleus in November.

Paris -
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) comet-chaser mission, already 10 years in transit, has rendezvoused with its target the 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko comet. The ESA Rosetta probe enters orbit around the comet today, Wednesday.

Warwick -
The European Space Agency announced Wednesday that a new space-based observatory to search for planets orbiting alien stars will form the third plank of the ESA’s medium-class (M-class) science missions.

Cayenne -
The European Space Agency launched a new satellite, Thursday, which is expected to "boldly go where no satellite has gone before," providing the most accurate three-dimensional map of our part of the Milky Way.

Cologne -
As the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter approaches the tenth anniversary of arrival in orbit at the Red Planet, the ESA has assembled a fascinating topographical ‘fly-by’ of Mars.

East Kilbride -
Examination of a meteorite that’s believed to have fallen to Earth around 3,000 years ago has provided clues as to how Mars lost its atmosphere, previously rich in carbon dioxide (CO2).

Darmstadt -
The European Space Agency (ESA) switched off its Planck space telescope for good at 12:10:27 UT, Thursday. Planck spent over four years peering back in time, studying background radiation from the Big Bang that gave birth to our Universe.

Edinburgh -
Latest observations on Arctic sea ice from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Cryosat mission, presented at a symposium in Edinburgh, Scotland, last week, reveal a new record low volume of sea ice in the northern polar region.

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Monday, the selection of ‘Biomass’ as the subject of its seventh Earth Explorer mission. The planned satellite will measure, to great accuracy, biomass and carbon stored in the world’s forests.

Obtained from the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, spectacular new high resolution images were yesterday released of the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion.

Early yesterday morning NASA released details of an observed solar phenomenon, an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection with the potential to disrupt satellites and communications over the next one to three days.

The European Space Agency and the Russian federal space agency, Roscosmos, announced today that they entered a formal agreement to work together on the ExoMars programme, looking ahead to the launch of two missions to the planet Mars in 2016 and 2018.

NASA and the European Space Agency this week announced that NASA would be participating in the ESA’s Euclid mission scheduled for launch in 2020. Euclid is a space telescope whose purpose is to investigate cosmic dark matter and dark energy.

The Planck space telescope operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) this week unveiled a spectacular image of a bridge of hot gases connecting a pair of galaxy clusters across millions of light years of space.

The Arctic sea ice looks as if it will be hitting a record low by the end of August, according to satellite data. Reports on August 13, 2012, show that the ice extent was 186,000 square miles below the 2007 data.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is planning to launch a space mission in 2022 to explore Jupiter's moons. ESA officials say the mission, Jupiter Icy moons Explorer (JUICE), will reach Jupiter in 2030 and spend three years studying its moons.

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Esa Image

Schematic of Arctic ice thickness in 2013 presented at the Living Planet Symposium 2013

ESA Living Planet Symposium

Close-up of the region containing Philae’s primary landing site J, which is located on the ‘head’ of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The mosaic comprises two images taken by Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow-angle camera on 14 September 2014 from a distance of about 30 km.

ESA

Ariane 5 solid booster is the main workhorse of the European Space Agency

Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, "Chury," from a distance of 26.3km taken Sept. 26, 2014. The picture shows a strong outgassing area at the "neck" of the comet.

ESA / Rosetta / NAVCAM

Mission control: A bee-hive of activity on Wednesday, Nov. 12.

ESA

Scientists working on the mission

ESA screenshot

This annotated image depicts two of the five potential landing sites for the Rosetta mission's Philae lander. The sites (A and C) are located on the larger of the two lobes that make up comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

NASA/JPL-Caltech / Image by ESA/Rosetta/MPS

XMM-Newton X-ray view of Messier 16

VLT/ISAAC/McCaughrean & Andersen/AIP/ESO

New Herschel and XMM-Newton image of M16

ESA

Satellite image of 2012 bloom (1/6 the size of 2011).

Credit: MERIS/NASA; processed by NOAA/NOS/NCCOS

The Cosmic microwave background (CMB) as observed by Planck, is a snapshot of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when the Universe was just 380 000 years old

ESA / Planck

On September 29, 2008, fter re-supplying the International Space Station, the European Space Agency's Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, where researchers captured fiery images of its demise high over an uninhabited section of the Pacific Ocean, southwest of Tahiti.

NASA/ESA/Bill Moede and Jesse Carpenter / Wikimedia Commons

The coloured dots represent targets observed by the radar. The colour scale ranges from 40 mm a year away from radar (red) to 40 mm a year towards radar (blue). Green represents stable targets.

ESA

Herschel’s view of the Horsehead Nebula in the context of its surroundings. The image is a composite of the wavelengths of 70 microns (blue), 160 microns (green) and 250 microns (red), and covers 4.5x1.5 degrees. The image is oriented with northeast towards the left of the image and southwest towards the right.